Journalism Summary 11/12/12

The Mosaic Monthly

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Yesterday, despite hurricane and snowstorm, the inaugural issue of "The Mosaic Monthly" made its debut as scheduled!

Congratulations to the students on a successful first issue. This issue is the product of five journalism classes where students learned about the basic elements of a newspaper, how to write a news article, how to write a feature article, how to write an editorial, and peer editing. Please have your student compare their article(s) they wrote for the paper to the final article that appeared. There were not many edits for punctuation or grammar, but mainly for content or wording. Reviewing the final printed version should give them a sense of what corrections were needed.

Our December issue will see added pages and sections. We'll be taking on world and national news and learning how to write an "in-depth." We'll be revisiting interviewing skills so we can question possible sources for our articles. Conducting research will be a critical element of our next issue.

On Monday, we discussed the differences and similarities between proofing and copy editing and practiced both in class. We learned about AP Style and why it's important to adopt a style for a publication such as ours. For homework, students were given an article and an instruction sheet on how to revise the article for content. We edited for style and conventions (grammar and punctuation) in class. The students will need to incorporate those corrections into their edits for organization and content. While this is an actual article that has been re-arranged for the purpose of this exercise, there can be many good "answers" and I encourage the students to incorporate their individual creativity into their re-writes!